by Bruce Johnson

Created on: August 14, 2009   Last Updated: August 16, 2009

There is little question that baseball's reputation has been hurt by the on-going revelations of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) being used by players, both past and present. In fact, reports of of PED use have become so commonplace that they barely register as news anymore. This fact indicates not only how bad it has become for baseball, but also provides a path for the league to come out of the darkness.

Let's start by considering what the real danger is. As any sport is discovered to have cheating within the game (and PEDs are just one form of cheating), the average sports fan begins to lose interest. This happened with cycling a couple of years ago. It happened with figuring skating around the time of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. It has been happening with baseball for the last five or six years. It's true that the die hard fans are still attracted to the games. They won't lose their love for the sport, regardless of the off-field activities. But most sports teams can't survive by attracting just the die-hard fans. They need to entice the occasional enthusiast who attends three or four games a year. Who buys merchandise when the team does well. Who watches the games on television. Those people provide the target audience that marketers love and that really successful teams have in droves.

But what if the reputation of the sport is tarnished? What if you can't tell which players are clean and which are doped up? Now the occasional enthusiast won't bother attending games . They won't buy the merchandise and will stop following the games on television. In other words, the team's revenue generation potential will be seriously impacted, all because of the perception of cheating.

This means that, in order to clean up its act, baseball must find a solution that has an impact on the casual enthusiast. That makes the average fan sit up and say "Now that's a good idea". As a starting point, this means coming clean. Not in dribs and drabs as has been happening, but in one fell swoop. Publish ALL of the names of the players who are known to have taken PEDs. If the players are still active. suspend them, with the suspension lasting until they have passed a number of random drug tests. For those players who are found to have taken PEDs, their statistics should be removed from the record books. In other words, any tainted records should be rescinded. If there is even the suspicion of cheating, have a committee review the evidence with the decision to remove

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